I hope everybody is surviving the holidays so far. I am off again, this time to San Diego for the yearly Antibody Engineering meetings sponsored by the Antibody Society. I am looking forward to the excellent science and to giving a talk about work going on in the lab. While it will be nice to enjoy the wonderful San Diego weather, it is even nicer to stay connected to science. It keeps me centered as I grapple with the day to day challenges (most of them are actually very interesting!) of running a Cancer Center.
Yesterday, I attended a very interesting meeting of the CCSG program formerly known as MTDT (no, we are not renaming it Purple Rain), organized by Mike Pishvaian. The objective was to identify new and exciting clinical trial concepts that would rapidly emanate from science being done at Lombardi, with support provided by me. Despite all of Mike’s efforts, the turnout was relatively sparse, though the discussions were vibrant and interesting. Those of us who attended got to have their ideas discussed and used as bases for a whole new generation of exciting clinical trials. Folks who chose not to attend really missed the boat on this opportunity!
Greetings from Miami, where I am attending the AACR Tumor Immunology Conference. The high today was 75 degrees. Cuban coffee is wonderful.
I hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving as we head into the full force of the holiday season. As you do your holiday shopping, please remember to check out shopforcancercures.org, which is a fundraising initiative of the Cancer Research Alliance; a portion of sales through that organization goes to the 11 member institutions (including Lombardi).
Things are very busy as we prepare for the meeting of the Committee on Medical Center Affairs (COMCA) of the Board of the Directors. I always look forward to the opportunity to share my vision and excitement about the cancer center, and the Board has proven to share in that enthusiasm.
I hope everyone stays warm (I guess I’ll miss Miami when I return to DC tomorrow).
I hope everybody found our recent Town Hall to be informative and useful. I know that I find it very valuable for all of us to get together for these types of updates. And you can be assured that we will continue to have these Town Halls as long as people are interested to hear what we have to say.
Everyone heard a lot about what’s happening at the Town Hall meeting, so I don’t have a lot of new information to share with you.
I did have a nice meeting with the Gala chairs last Monday as we start planning for next year’s Gala. While the event planning is obviously at its earliest stages, we are committed to bring it back – freshly updated – and continuing to be the premier celebration of the accomplishments and mission of Lombardi.
Below you will find a guest post from Maria Laura Avantaggiati, which is in part a response to one of my recent posts. Have a great week.
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Dr. Maria Laura Avantaggiati
I am personally pleased that Obama won this election, and several editorials on Nature have outlined his positions on novel initiatives that he plans to undertake. One of them includes the reinstatement of the appointment of a science advisor who reports directly to the President, and apparently Dr. Varmus has been playing a somewhat equivalent role during his presidential campaign. Therefore, we can anticipate that his choices for this position, as well as for the NIH and NCI directors, will be in a category of people who are in touch with the scientific community.
On the other hand, Obama’s proposals and projections to redouble NIH funding will have to deal with the challenges of this economy of the next two years. I am also certain that within the budget for science, the first priority will be on development of alternative energy. Thus, we may not see a real impact on grant success rates for quite awhile.
There are additional concerns that I would like to share, and that are independent of the NIH budget. While I do not entirely disagree with all the changes that the Zherouni’ administration has introduced in the NIH grant programs, there will be negative tails from his policy. Zherouni and Scarpa have reshaped the grant review process, and starting next year the size of RO1s will be similar to that of R21s. It can be anticipated that this will favor large laboratories with a higher track record of publications. While a few years back we could get an RO1 on great ideas and work that was not yet published, this will be highly unlikely, if not impossible, in the years to come.
This is worrisome, especially when we think about the explosion of resources and technology that comes from the biotech companies. Certain companies such as Origene, Genescript and others have expression vectors-, antibodies- and siRNA- ready for thousands of the human and mouse ORFs. At the cost of 30K (not so unreasonable after all!) Taconics offers transgenic or knockout mice strains for 20,000+ genes, many of which have not been published yet, and for which preliminary information about the phenotype (whether embryonic lethal or not), is already known.
Today, if we are working on a new gene and have thousands of dollars to spend, in a few weeks we could have cDNAs, antibodies, siRNAs and a mouse model that could make our science really competitive in time. And time is at the essence of our work. This again will give an advantage to large laboratories. Without the thousands, we are back to the standard, old fashion, time consuming, laboratory techniques.
When we look at papers that are published on high impact journals, and RO1 grants the get funded in study sections, it is really the techniques and the resources that the laboratories employ that make the difference. The difference is between being able to ask questions at a mechanistic level, or simply describe a phenomenon.
So, how can we remain competitive, and keep up with the fast pace at which science is moving in a period of financial constraints? Obviously there is no easy solution, One of the initiatives that I thought about, and I discussed individually with some of our collegues, is to programmatically (and Departmentally) invest money in purchasing key, cutting edge reagents that could serve the purpose of advancing projects with potential for PO1s applications, which could act as research catalysts for multiple investigators. We could programmatically invest in salary support for key personnel as well, such as one technician or one post-doctoral fellow who could work on the development of such projects. This could be done in a competitive fashion, with intra-departmental grant applications. Similarly to what is being done with IRG grants, except with a more sizeable budget, and by keeping applications within the Lombardi Cancer Center.
May be it is a surrealistic proposal. Is this something that Dr. Weiner and other colleagues would find reasonable and feasible?
Sorry I missed you last week, but I was a little busy. We had an opportunity to host a delegation from the largest hospital in China last week. The Chinese PLA 301 General Hospital – also known as Hospital 301 – is, I am told, the Chinese equivalent of a hybrid of Massachusetts General Hospital and Walter Reed Hospital. The chairman of the Chinese Traditional Medicine Department presented his work on using traditional medicines to limit radiation therapy-related injury to the lung, and several Lombardi investigators described our work in drug discovery and establishing G-DOC. There’s strong interest from both sides in continuing to explore collaboration opportunities.
It was also very interesting to be a guest for dinner at the Chinese Embassy where I learned the elaborate rituals for drinking shots of a traditional liquor called Maotai. I lost count after the 7th toast, but our hosts seemed to have a very good time.
However, the true highlight of the week for me occurred on Wednesday. I was in Philadelphia for a cancer center site visit and the baseball gods decreed that my beloved Phillies should win the World Series while I was in town. I got to join a horde of surprisingly well-behaved Philadelphians in an impromptu victory parade that lasted well into the night. Hence, the absence of a blog last week…
Like many of you, I was up far too late on election night this week. It’s hard to know how the changes in the administration and Congress will affect the work we do here at Lombardi. However, President-Elect Obama has previously indicated a desire to double the NCI budget in 5 years. I don’t have to tell you how I would feel if he and Congress are able to deliver on that particular promise.
Harriet and I are wondering whether we should watch the inaugural parade in person, from our home, or if we should get out of town. We’ll probably hang around because it should be quite a remarkable occasion.
And while I can’t promise that next week’s Town Hall meeting will be as remarkable as a Presidential Inauguration, I do hope to see you all there.
Congratulations to Suzanne O’Neill, Tapas Saha, Rebecca Riggins and Tushar Deb for successfully competing for our institutional American Cancer Society Young Investigator Awards. Suzanne’s project is entitled, “Breast Cancer Patients’ Experience with Risk for Recurrence Testing.” Tapas will study the role of chaperone-mediated autophagy in breast cancer. Rebecca is studying how exposure to BPA induces Tamoxifen resistance in ER-positive breast cancer, and Tushar is investigating the mechanism of Pnck-induced tumorigenesis in HER2 amplified human breast cancer.
Many of you may remember our very interesting and successful ACS symposium last month, where the talented young investigators who received last year’s awards presented their work to an audience that included representatives from ACS. I look forward to hearing presentations about these projects next year.
The GUMC strategic planning process is well under way, and I am helping to lead the Systems Biomedicine design team. It has been a pleasure to get to know Mark Smith from the Washington Hospital Center, who has designed what may be the leading medical informatics system that is available. Along those lines, we’ll be hosting a Chinese delegation next week hoping to engage them in collaborations around G-DOC and our drug discovery efforts.
Yesterday, Curt Harris, from the NCI gave a terrific Department of Medicine Grand Rounds discussing his approaches to analyzing polymorphisms and microRNA expression profiles to define cancer risk, prognosis and predictive value. Like many of us, he views the analysis of multiple parameters as being necessary to make sense of all the complex information that is being generated.
I have the distinct pleasure of announcing that Lucile Adams-Campbell has been elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences (read the press release). This is a remarkable achievement. I am sure you’ll join me in congratulating Lucile. As you know, Lucile recently joined us, and this external recognition further reinforces my delight in having her at Lombardi. Stay tuned for news about a special reception to recognize her achievement.
Dr. Potter with his portrait.
I really enjoyed last Friday’s lecture and reception honoring Dr. John Potter. I know the recognition of his founding contributions meant a lot to him. If you haven’t seen his portrait, check it out by the elevators in the Lombardi lobby.
Thursday is a big day for me, as I finally start seeing patients again. I’ll only have one half-day of clinic per week, but I can assure you that patient care is very important to me, and I am convinced that the humbling responsibility that comes with the territory inspires me and lends added urgency to my research and my research ambitions for Lombardi. What we all do really matters.
Finally, plans for submitting our competitive CCSG renewal are humming along. We have received first drafts for all the programs and cores, and now the hard work of reviewing the write-ups (I will be ably assisted by a small army of internal reviewers) has begun. After one round of revisions, the write-ups will go out to our ESAC for their review and comments.
One of the most remarkable features of Lombardi is that our total funding for research actually rose over the past six years, despite the end of the NCI doubling in 2003. This certainly reflects the excellence of our investigators, as we all compete in much deeper and more treacherous funding waters than in the past. So, I am delighted to report that we continue to compete very successfully. For example, our T32 grant, which supports many of our most important educational programs, fared extremely well in review, and will be highly competitive for a favorable funding decision. Congratulations and thanks to Anna Riegel for taking the lead on this very important initiative.
I spent Monday and Tuesday in Chicago, at the AACI meeting, with other Cancer Center Directors. One session focused on the importance of creating tissue banks, and developing high-quality methods for accessing, processing and distributing tissue specimens. We are fortunate to have developed a powerful collaboration with Indivumed to facilitate these activities; needless to say, this will be a fundamental backbone of efforts to create integrated clinical and molecular cancer databases. John Niederhuber, the Director of the NCI, gave a very thoughtful address, and was mercifully spared the onerous task of defending federal funding decisions regarding the NCI budget during the question and answer period.
Speaking of Dr. Niederhuber, I hope everyone will attend the inaugural John F. Potter, MD, Distinguished Lecture, which will be held at 4 pm today in the Gorman Building auditorium. We are honored by Dr. Niederhuber’s presentation of his lecture, but it is important to recognize that he in turn joins us in honoring Dr. John Potter, who is the founding director of the Lombardi Cancer Center. Dr. Potter was on the team of doctors that cared for Vince Lombardi, and occupies a special place in the history of Georgetown University and the Medical Center for having recognized, advocated and developed the Cancer Center. We are all here today because Dr. Potter had the vision and energy to make cancer research and cancer care a priority at Georgetown. To commemorate Dr. Potter’s accomplishments, a reception will follow his comments and Dr. Niederhuber’s presentation, with a rededication of his portrait, which currently hangs in the Martin Marietta conference room, to a more prominent location in the Atrium of the Lombardi building. I do hope you can join us for this memorable event.
On Wednesday, Lombardi hosted the now annual Hyundai Hope on Wheels Event. This year, Aziza Shad’s pediatric survivorship program received a $40,000 check from the Washington area Hyundai dealers, bringing their contributions to more than $200,000 over the past five years. The touching handprint ceremony celebrates the achievements of our pediatric team and the brave patients we serve. In recognition of the event, DC Mayor Adrian Fenty proclaimed Wednesday, September 24th, 2008, the official Hope on Wheels Day for the District of Columbia.
Hope on Wheels
On that note, I hope that many of you have had a chance to meet Joe Teague, who is spearheading Lombardi’s Advancement efforts. Joe is working hard to identify and expand our donor base, and we are putting together case statements for our high priority initiatives. You’ll hear more about them in the near future. We are fortunate to have unified and powerful support for our fundraising efforts from all of the important stakeholders at Georgetown. We need to be patient, since it will take time to create and benefit from having a real fundraising engine, but I am very optimistic.
Finally, I spent time in the Lombardi clinic yesterday so John Deeken could show me the ropes. My first day seeing patients is in the middle of next month. While I’ll have to keep my practice small, I really look forward to getting back to patient care; I am always inspired by my patients, and reminded that cancer research should always be conducted with the knowledge that people depend on us to help them. We have lots of work to do!
I’m glad to be back at work, though my schedule has been pretty hectic this week.
My blue suede shoes
In my last post, I neglected to mention the fabulous Doo Wop Concert for Cancer, held at the Warner Theater on October 6. Thanks to the fabulous efforts of the organizing committee the theater was full, and everyone seemed to have a great time (special kudos to Paul Schweitzer and Jack Schneider, and to Elena Jeannotte for carrying on the great work started by Bonnie Roberts). I do not know what I will do with the blue suede shoes I purchased for the occasion, though I am open to suggestions. We raised a lot of money for Lombardi programs, and I hope we will have similar events in future years. And, don’t forget that the Gala will be back next year!
For those of you who did not attend, we had a very nice reception yesterday in the E501 conference room to congratulate Chip Albanese, Rabindra Roy, Offie Soldin, and Ken Tercyak on their promotions. Expect this to become a Lombardi tradition. It was also great to see Arnie Potosky and Subha Madhaven at the reception, so I could informally welcome them too, as new members of our faculty.
I was at the Georgetown University Board of Directors meeting on Thursday morning, and as always, came away impressed by the commitment of the Board to the success of Lombardi.
Finally, I really enjoyed Jeff Toretsky’s research presentation this week. It is always fun to witness the early development of exciting translational research initiatives, though I was disappointed that Jeff did not bring his clarinet to play a tune appropriate for the occasion.
Greetings from Colorado. I’ve tried to not think too much about work, but I am really ready to dive back into action.
Lucile Adams-Campbell reminded me of a wonderful tradition she remembered from when she spent time at Fox Chase Cancer Center. Every afternoon there is an informal “tea” where people get together and socialize or talk about their science. It made me wonder if we should start our own tradition where we can all get together as our schedules permit. Any comments?
